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Yesh Atid Spreads Lie about International Women’s Day

March 10, 2014

MK Dr. Aliza Lavie of Yesh Atid, Chairperson of the Knesset's Committee for the Advancement of Women and Gender Equality, spread false information about the origin of International Women's Day in the party's email newsletter Sunday.

"On March 8, 1857, textile workers in New York protested against their poor employment conditions and humiliating wages. This protest was dispersed with violence,” wrote Lavie. “Since then, this day is marked annually as International Women's Day.”

The truth is different, as MK Lavie would have found out, had she checked the Wikipedia entry regarding International Women's Day.

“A popular apocryphal story which surfaced in French Communist circles claimed that women from clothing and textile factories had staged a protest on March 8, 1857 in New York City,” explains Wikipedia. “The story alleged that garment workers were protesting against very poor working conditions and low wages and were attacked and dispersed by police. It was claimed that this event led to a rally in commemoration of its 50th anniversary in 1907. Temma Kaplan explains that 'neither event seems to have taken place, but many Europeans think March 8, 1907, inaugurated International Women's Day.' Speculating about the origins of this 1857 legend, Liliane Kandel and Françoise Picq suggested it was likely that (in recent times) some felt it opportune to detach International Women's Day from its basis in Soviet history and ascribe to it a more 'international' origin which could be painted as more ancient than Bolshevism and more spontaneous than a decision of [the 1910 International Congress of Socialist Women] or the initiative of those women affiliated to the Party.”

International Women's Day was founded as a communist holiday, pure and simple. The idea was presented to the International Socialist Women's Congress by Clara Zetkin in 1910, and was embraced by Vladimir Lenin, the Soviet Union's first leader, who made it an official holiday in the dictatorship a few months after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. It served as an annual occasion for spreading anti-family propaganda among women, in order to encourage them to see family life as a burden, and view work outside the home as their primary goal in life – thus taking them out of the sphere of influence of their husbands, and of religion, and under the total influence of the party and its organizations.

Communism is a cruel dictatorial system that is responsible for more murders than any other system of government. It strips its citizens of all personal property – and even brings their most vital family bonds under state control.

Gender organizations in Israel and elsewhere in the world have succeeded, in the last 50 years,in reproducing this type of family dissolution in states that are not communist at all, and have revived International Women's Day for this purpose. For obvious reasons, they do everything possible to hide the true origins of the day – and that is why the false version of its origins was invented. It was this version that MK Lavie spread, using Yesh Atid's email as a platform.

International Women's Day poster, USSR, 1932.

The text above reads: "8th of March is the day of rebellion of the working women against kitchen slavery" and "Down with the oppression and narrow-mindedness of household work!"

Originally in the USSR the holiday had a clear political character, emphasizing the role of the Soviet state in the liberation of women from their second-class-citizen status. This message was toned down when family breakdown became a huge problem and millions of parentless children roamed the streets.